Focus transition

Typography Beard Guide on Behance

If a feature or product were legitimately easy…

If a feature or product were legitimately easy the user would not be writing in to support about how stuck they are. Sure, some percentage of users will find questions to ask about any interface. But do you want to start the conversation by assuming the user falls into that percentage? You venture to learn much more if you assume the software is wrong, not the user.

— Andrew Spittle

Website Development Productivity on a small MacBook

We all love things big. We all love things small. It would be difficult for me to go back to working on a desktop machine, since I work on a MacBook with two external monitors (at home and at work). Luckily my home iMac is new enough to support mini-display if not Thunderbolt. However, once you’ve gotten used to seeing your IDE (Coda for me), your Photoshop mockup, your browser (480px and 960px simultaneously for responsive web design) and Element Inspector all at the same time, it’s difficult to work on an 13″ Macbook. The solution is a mix of built-in options and an $18 third-party application.

Niice. A search engine with taste.

It claims to be “A search engine with taste.” It’s a lot like Pinterest for only design, but it should be used for more than general viewing. The search function is, well, nice. Search for elephant or script or a color.

New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual

The Art And Craft Of Arabic Type Design

Q: Where do you get your inspiration from?

It is always the streets of Beirut. Not the way my city is now, but how I wish it to be. When I studied graphic design in Beirut, I was always frustrated by the low quality of available Arabic fonts. It felt as if this is a reflection of a much larger state of being, of everything that is not OK in our part of the world. And that was a state of affairs that was intolerable, and so I set about trying to make my environment look better, one letter at a time.

Ultimate Website Checklist for Launch

Somedays I wish designing and coding websites was just Photoshop/Illustrator and a code editor (I like Coda at this time), but it’s not. Once you understand how the whole system works (Best Practices are changing everyday in this industry…) and you work at a place that has clients based on relationships (therefore valuing quality over shipping bad product), it’s a varied list of technologies to provide optimal performance, social sharing, error checking, compiling, and general quality assurance. There are many of these lists out on the web. Mine is targeting the WordPress CMS, but should be applicable to most content management systems and probably most websites. Remember, it’s sometimes about removing a feature instead of adding one.

Carousel Interaction Stats

A Sampling of Mobile Design Patterns

Great User Experiences Require Great Front-End Development

“If a Front-End Development team reports to Engineering, the team gets rewarded for solving back-end technology challenges. But front-end development is not about solving back-end technology problems. It should be about making sure a product’s user experience differentiates the product in its marketplace.”